Sunday, June 10, 2012

A while ago I was using my iPod video (5.5G, 30GB) with a self-made aux-in on my car stereo.

Unfortunately my electronics knowledge was even more limited at that time and I did not realize the tape head was biased at ~12V so I connected the ground pin of the line-in directly to the common/ground of the tape head. This caused my iPod to reset each time I tried charging it with the jack phone connected.

A few months later I switched to a 12V power hub which included a really crappy USB port as well. The moment I tried to charge the iPod while playing smoke came out of both the supply and iPod.

In hindsight this was a stupid idea since the ground voltage of the charger was at 0V and the ground voltage of the ipod (headphone and usb) was sitting at 12V (it should have been 6V but the cassette player had a boost supply).

I've bought a NEC beamer on the cheap (~30E) which ran for about 1 second before becoming dead.
In the interest of reference I'm attaching pictures taken with a phone camera so that other people know what they are getting themselves into.

This is my first post and testing the system.
This blog will be about various builds, hacks, fixes and whatever technical stuff I may encounter that will be relevant to some readers.
I will mostly try to refrain from personal opinions as a benchmark, though I am a human being.